I agree in general, but as I noted at the end of my mail, RHEL 7 does get
non-bugfix/security updates nowadays. And from what I see many of the people
working on those updates also work on GNOME and we should try figuring out
what they need before potentially making their lives harder.

Speaking as one of the people involved in RHEL7 GNOME maintenance: we've never made demands to hold back upstream

progress because it would be more convenient for us. We've worked around the python3 appearance in the a11y stack and

the more recent meson adoption as well as we could. Its part of what we paid to do.